MAHA Summit — Brought to You by Psychedelic Pharma
Normie, Mike, and Neşe discuss the upcoming MAHA Summit and its psychedelic pharmaceutical sponsors.
Transcript
This transcript was generated automatically from YouTube's captions, then cleaned up by removing filler words, repeated words and background sounds. It may still contain errors.
[00:00] The upcoming Maha Summit that's going to be taking place on September 29th. Bunch of psychedelic companies, Peptide Companies, Walmart, Open AAI, and Anthropic are sponsoring the event. Exactly. At any other point in time, I think this would kind of be totally egregious. Politico wrote that some sponsors and speakers are on the verge of regulator regulatory approval. Compass Pathways Definium Therapeutics and Helis Pharma, developers of psychedelic drugs to treat mental illness, are summit sponsors and speaking on a panel alongside Matt Zorn, HHS deputy general counsel. I don't know. I'm not accusing him of corruption. I'm not accusing him of even like an explicit conflict of interest with what he's doing here.
[00:45] I know his thoughts and like views on on the FDA and we've had a lot of conversations over the years. We agree on a lot of places. We disagree on some places. It's the appearance of like impartiality on behalf of a government regulator. I don't know what he's doing with this. It looks [expletive] terrible to me that a deputy general counsel for HHS is on stage with pharmaceutical execs who are at the last leg of FDA approval at this point. I don't know what he is doing. Hello everybody and welcome back to the Psymposia podcast.
[01:31] Today I am joined by Nishay and Mike and we are going to be discussing Politico's new story that just came out called RFK Jr.'s movement now has corporate sponsors. It's about the upcoming Maha Summit that's going to be taking place on September 29th. It's about all the sponsors that are sponsoring the event, including a bunch of psychedelic companies, Peptide Companies, Walmart, OpenAI, and Anthropic. So, we kind of just wanted to get into some of the glaring issues that I think come with this where the HHS, head of the HHS, RFK, is openly doing an event that has a bunch of companies that his agency is tasked with regulating.
[02:22] So, what did you guys what was your takeaways from the piece? Nay? Well, I just kept thinking of Philip K. novels the whole time. I mean, it's such a like dystopian sci-fi kind of story. And it's so it just speaks to how far the descent into kind of fascism and corruption has gone that this sort of thing would not be accepted 5 years ago and yet it's just open corruption now. Yeah, that's exactly what I'm thinking. I mean, this is like definitionally corruption. I think the one of the most interesting things about this is that it's apparently technically not state sponsored, but because MA is a like entity, a business entity.
[03:07] Oh, we're going to get we're going to get into the we're going to get into this. Mike, I went kind of down the rabbit hole of like the Russian doll maha organizations. That's what's interesting to me is that this is just like it's just how blatant it is and how kind of normalized it's become. Exactly. At any other point in time, I think this would kind of be totally egregious, but now it's just it's, you know, it kind of goes to show how far the Overton window has been moved where this is just it's just another day. You know, it's a fire hose of [expletive] So, it's just another day and it's like within a day or two, nobody even recognizes it because we're on to more [expletive] the next day. So, I just wanted to get into some of the passages within the article. So, they write that top ranking officials in Kennedy's health department are expected to speak this year, including Chris Clamp, the nominee for HHS deputy secretary, Kyle Diamantis, the acting commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, who's also a good buddy with Trump Jr.
[04:07] Hunting Hunting Buddy. Jay, I always screw up his name. It's Bata Badacharia. Is that right? I think so. You think so? Okay, we're going with it. Dire he's the director of National Institutes of Health and Dr. Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Cali Means, White House senior adviser who helped cement Kennedy's alliance with President Trump in 2024, is also stated to speak. Cali means has put a lot of [expletive] out on social media about us in the past accusing us. This is the [expletive] irony here accusing us of the dole of big pharma. So yeah, and it's to me it's just a cluster [expletive] of speakers. So Steak and Shake, they actually have something called the chief Maha officer.
[04:52] They're going to be there. The founder of Sweet Green, various healthc care CEOs, tellahalth companies. Wait, Steak and Shake the restaurant. Yeah, they have. Yeah. Chief Maha officer. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They've been leaning into it pretty hard, you know, with especially with the beef tallow. Like they went pretty hard pretty early into that. Friedberg from the All-In podcast, the a secretary Broo Rollins, she's the one who previously told poor people to get by eating a piece of chicken, a piece of broccoli, a corn tortilla, and one other thing. We've run over a thousand simulations. It can cost around $3 a meal for a piece of chicken, a piece of broccoli, u you know, corn tortilla, and one other thing.
[05:38] So, it's like a complete mess of influencers, like regulators, CEOs, podcast bros, grifters. Did you mention Mike Tyson of boxing earring? I abs I absolutely [laughter] mentioned him. Yeah, sponsorships run from 50,000 to 100,000. Although, if you kind of can't afford it, they make exceptions for you. It's It's a very It's very weird. And the tying the higher sponsorship prices to speaking slots is also very rich where it's like literally like paytoplay, getting your perspective, buying to have your perspective shared. In this context, it comes from the top down.
[06:24] I mean, Trump has been doing this. Like, there was a story out, I forget the source of it came out. I heard someone speak about it the other day, but it was about how Lutnik basically paid had to pay Trump $25 million to kind of remain in his position. It's like the entirety of the government is basically in on this model at this point. Yeah. There there's a story recently about all of the pardons like there's a pardon industry where with like a pardon fixer who kind of like makes the call and people pay for it. Those guys were kind of like the easy guys to get rid of though before the election. That that goes kind of deep. But yeah. All right. So the here's some of the list of the sponsors that that are at the summit.
[07:09] We're gonna focus today obviously Compass Pathways, Definium Therapeutics, and Helis. Heal us. Isn't it like heal us? Heal is it? Is it that? Wow. [laughter] I didn't know. Very clever. It's cute, isn't it? You guys think it's cute? Definium Therapeutics is formerly a Mind M mind, mind medicine, and heal us. I guess that's what it is. That's formerly Cybin. both of those companies had had re rebranded, but all three of those companies are currently Compass is the they're all they're currently all in phase three. Compass is the furthest along. So, Politico wrote that some sponsors and speakers are on the verge of regulator regulatory approval.
[07:56] Compass Pathways Definium Therapeutics and Helis Pharma developers of psychedelic drugs to treat mental illness are summit sponsors and speaking on a panel alongside Matt Zorn, HHS deputy general counsel. Compass Pathways is preparing to submit a final new drug application to the FDA by the end of the year. In Defininium plans to file in the first half of two 2027. The three companies told Politico their participate their participation was motivated by their desire to engage in dialogues around mental health. Quote, "It's really around mental health, furthering treatment in this space." End quote. Said Michael Halstead, Helis Pharma's chief executive, which expects to file for FDA approval in 2028. This summit marks Helis Pharma's first time as a MA sponsor. as you're getting closer to being able to hopefully positively impact patients, you get more involved in more of these sorts of things," he added.
[08:54] It just it's kind of like it's just so insulting to people's intelligence to say, "Oh, this is we just want to be in the room and we just want to have these important conversations." Like, they're not even It's not even like good propaganda. It's like they don't even need to be effective in hiding what they're doing. It's about mental health, but it's not about money. Not about money at all. I just want to say something here because you know Politico Politico talks about Matt Zorn is going to be interviewing these three CEOs from these three psychedelic companies who are all in phase three. As we've said before, Matt Zorn was our lawyer. We've been friends with him for a handful of years now. He defended us on the Church of Silomthoxin lawsuit that in down in Texas.
[09:44] And Matt had, this isn't Matt's first time that he's going to be at the Maha Summit. He had previously interviewed Christian Anger Meyer last November at the summit. Please welcome Christian Anger Mayor, founder and chairman Atai Beckley, founder and chairman Enhanced Games, and Matt Zorn, deputy general counsel for the US Department of Health and Human Services. I'm really excited to be here with Christian Anger Meer. We're here to talk about psychedelic. So, what do you guys think about this? What are your thoughts? I have thoughts on this. What do you guys should we have that kind of music when we come out for the podcast? Oh, we could [laughter] game show host music. Yeah. No, it's just wild that it is like a game show and just the fact that Zorn is the one who is rewriting, you know, the law to try to help, you know, attempting to reconfigure the FDA to make it easier for these companies to move their products through to approval.
[10:43] And yet he's appearing in these contexts is very Yeah, it's just that's why I keep think thinking of PKD, Philip K. it cuz it's exactly the type of thing [laughter] that would be in this sort of like sci-fi. It's also like the idiocracy thing, right? Like it's just so so idiocracy. Every It's like every part of government is idioid at this point. I So we haven't really said anything about Matt Zorn publicly other than he's worked for us. He kind of with the executive order he so he did the Wall Street Journal little mini documentary prior to Lily's acquisition of a tie which we talked about. Yeah, we talked about that on the previous show. At this time in the video we just played a Tai and Christian hadn't yet been acquired by Lily.
[11:33] We didn't comment on Matt at the time in this Maha Summit. I just don't, like I said, I like Matt. I don't know. I'm not accusing him of corruption. I'm not accusing him of even like an explicit conflict of interest with what he's doing here. I know his thoughts and like views on on the FDA and we've had a lot of conversations over the years. We agree on a lot of places, we disagree on some places. It's the appearance of like impartiality on behalf of a government regulator. I don't know what he's doing with this. It looks [expletive] terrible to me that a deputy general counsel for HHS is on stage with pharmaceutical execs who are at the last leg of FDA approval at this point.
[12:24] I don't know what's really going on. I don't know. I know he believes in these. He's I don't want to call him like a complete true believer. I think that he has some skepticism or some like balance in his views, but I don't know what he's doing on stage with these guys. Like, you could literally put anybody else on stage with these guys. I just think it looks bad. And I would tell him that if I was talking to him, this looks [expletive] bad, dude. You should not be there should be some kind of professional separation here. And Matt, I've had a lot of conversations with him and he has always been on top of ethics and all of these things and the conversations that we've had it he shouldn't be up there. Yeah. I mean, he's also slated to speak next month at the Horizon's conference, you know, amongst a lot of other psychedelic business people and, you know, people developing the field in that way.
[13:17] So it even if it is not a legal conflict of interest like and he's allowed to do it, it does highlight a lot of blurry lines here and you know whose interests are getting the priority ear of the regulators and whose perspectives are not getting as much of a say in these conversations. I do think a lot of it has to do with the fact that the FDA, HHS, they're trying to show that they're taking the psychedelic thing seriously. You know, there's a lot of powerful interests that are really pushing this industry. And so to show up and be in dialogue and showing that the government entities are doing their part and that they're not at fault for it not being approved yet, I think that's a component of this.
[14:06] I'll say also because you know people know that Zoran was our lawyer as we've talked about that a lot but you know as you were alluding to we he was not just our lawyer we were in close contact with him for a long time about many things to the point that I think many people would be surprised and actually the last thing that I last time I saw him in person I was speaking at the University of Pennsylvania for a course and he was one of the other presenters on the day that I was presenting it was right after I think it was after the New York Times article came out or something like that, but we were taking a picture of every one of the speakers and he specifically didn't want to be in a picture with me, which I thought was really interesting because it was like and I even talked to him about afterwards. I was like I could tell that's what it was and then he admitted it.
[14:53] And I just think that's very interesting because it's like I said like there's been a lot of internal dialogue amongst us on the team about you know well maybe because Zorn is aware of a lot of the non-public issues that have that we are aware of that maybe he could be a force for good at the FDA but at the same time I think like a lot of people have pointed out about around Joe Rogan and like when you're useful for power in a specific way it's very easy even if you mean well to become a tool to be operationalized and kind of cons conscripted for these broader purposes. Yeah. Matt, if you're listening, yeah, you're invited on the podcast anytime to talk about some of these things. I'd love to actually have a conversation. We were going to we were going to do one a while ago.
[15:39] I think it was actually I think he proposed to us to have a debate with us and so we had some prep for that call and we realized that we actually agreed on most things in the space and there was like kind of no room for a debate. So we kind of end up ended up not doing it. So just a couple more things that I want to touch on. HHS has denied involvement in this event. They gave a co quote to political politico and they said that they were not involved in the planning or sponsorship activities for the maja summit and were not aware of the sponsorship arrangements. Take that for what it's worth. It's a and it's the thing which the other point that I want to get into is this like kind of shell game of the maha of the various maja organizations.
[16:29] So Mike, you had brought that up earlier. So the this event is actually run by So there's three primary MAHA groups that are two that are kind of involved in the event, but they're sort of connected to the third. So there's the Maha Center, that's a 501c3. There's Maha Action, which is a 501c4, and there's the Maha Pack, which is a pack. All of the organizations are run by this guy Tony Lions. And Tony Lions has had connection to his connections to Kennedy predates Maja. He has a publishing company called Skyorse and he's published Kennedy's books, The Real Anthony Fouchy, that was in 2001 and a letter to liberals that was in 2022.
[17:18] Those books were part of RFK's Children's Health Defense book series. and Children's Health Defense is the antivax like the vaccine misinformation nonprofit that RFK sort of founded in 2018. It had actually been founded I think in 2007 I want to say it was originally started out as the world mercury project which got into like mercury and vaccines. RFK then joined that and it eventually became the children's health defense. So the my so I tried to figure out like how is the how is everything divided from tickets to sponsorships who is like kind of tackling you know what here and so what Politico had reported on that Maha Action so this is I'm going to just read it to you Maha Action another Lionsr run nonprofit often tiered offers tiered subscriptions to supporters for
[18:20] Access with its highest leadership circle costing $6,000 a year but promising four guaranteed DC events per year. Guaranteed attendance at the Maha Summit and a signed deluxe edition of the real Anthony Fouchy Kennedy's 2021 book published by Skyorse Publishing which is owned by Lions. So there's yet another Maha organization. This one's not run by Lions. It's called Maha Holdings which Kennedy's son Finn is on the board. That's the organization that is processing the sponsorship payments. If you actually go on the Maha Summit website and you click sponsorships, it brings you to the it tells you to email someone at Maha Holdings.
[19:05] So that's another company. And then the other thing it lists on the website that the trademarks for MA and Make America Great Again, Make America Healthy Again, that's owned by Maha TM LLC. So, it's an absolute mess of various MA organizations that he's just clearly preparing, he being RFK is his circle is clearly preparing to like, in my opinion, keep this going like well beyond Trump, keep this like, you know, this grift moving on and probably merging more with psychedelics or, you know, with these other griy pseudocience organizations.
[19:50] So that was five Maha organizations that you listed. And then there's one more which is the Maha Commission which the What's this? Yeah, this is the only MAJA entity out of all six that we clearly know of that have MAHA in the name that's embedded within the federal government and it was created by an executive order in February and it's chaired by the HHS secretary and has the assistant to the president for domestic policy which is Vince Haley as its executive director but it's not necessarily like tied to this event or these I guess corporations private corporations maha corporations But it's all in the constellation, right? So there's the Moa Commission is like officially within the government, created by an executive order, and then you have five other, you know, corporations that are not public, you know, not within the government.
[20:45] And for those that don't know, the 5013C is a charitable organization. A 501c4 is an organization created for social welfare which they are 5013C's are exempt from or they're not able to spend money on any kind of governmental or like political action at all and a 501c4 is explicitly allowed to like donate to government candidates and things like that. Just another like tangle in the web. Was the commission part of the psychedelic executive order at all or was that like a totally separate That was a totally separate thing, right? I think it was separate, but it was Yeah, because it was a little bit before. Oh my god. The So the this thing actually in it includes education secretary Linda McMahon and OM Russ Vo.
[21:36] Wild run away. Yeah, she's part of the MA commission. You're saying Linda? That's what the Make America Healthy Again Commission consists of RFK as the chair, Vince Haley as the executive director, a secretary, Brooke Rollins, Marty Mccari was on there. I don't know if he's still on there, Linda McMahon, Russ Vote, Jay Badacharia. Yeah, that's who comprises the commission. Total [expletive] mess. So the Maha Commission was the executive order was created February 13th, 2025 directed to examine the prevalence and threat posed by the prescription of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, SSRIs, antiscychotics, mood stabilizers, stimulants, and weight loss drugs within 100 days.
[22:25] Also tasked with researching childhood diseases and mental disorders, including autism. And that seems like a pretty obvious foundation for the psychedelic investigation of these groups. Yeah, I think that psychedelic companies can kind of slot right in with exactly so much of this. I mean, just because of the kind of nature of how psychedelics work, they're they this is why Compass initially just threw spaghetti at the wall and tried to patent them for everything. they had gone so far as to apply included in their patent submission for Pyromania. So yeah, it'll be interesting to see just or to see how far the field supporters will go along with all of this, you know, cuz it's like some people are still holding on to this idea that any win is a win for the field.
[23:15] So whatever people need to do, whatever the companies need to do to get approval, but I just wonder like if at a certain point people are going to wake up and say the realize that the way that we're doing this is not separable from the outcomes and that the type of psychedelic medicine field we're going to have by playing with this corruption and you know collaborating with fascism, it I don't think people are going to be happy with the results of that version of psychedelic medicine. Well, if this isn't the threshold, then what is? And I think we're seeing it already with like cases like Matt Zorn, you know, he he's clearly come from somewhere support, you know, like defending Psymposia and having a lot of good opinions and deeply embedded in this situation now.
[24:03] And I think it's one of those slippery slope situations where a lot of the people that might have had a hard line or a red line have already slipped past it and now they're saying, "Okay, well, you know, now psychedelics are mainstream and that's what we were looking for." And they don't realize that it's the wrong kind. It's not the kind that they were looking for and it's going to decrease access, increase, you know, I mean, it's just it's the Trump administration. What else is there to say? Yeah, I think that people who made these calculations are probably going to realize that they completely miscalculated as especially as the substances I and this remains to be sign if this is actually going to happen, but I've thought for a while that the psychedelic project has slowly and then more quickly become a right-wing project.
[24:51] And this is this started out with Rick Dablin starting small and now it's just this is what we get. We get the Maha Summit. This is so so far this is, you know, how that has culminated. I think it will probably keep going more and more. And the right-wing, you know, the right-wing ecosystem is is a let's look the one of the biggest causes right now is like publicly crucifying Fouchy. This is an anti-science, anti-vax movement. What better thing to introduce or to slot into and to integrate into that ecosystem than poor psychedelic science, you know? This is like the perfect thing to put in there.
[25:38] Exactly. And it comes alongside it comes along the same time as what are they Jake and Logan Paul at you know being recruited as spokespeople for the administration. I mean it's so comical and the game show thing too, right? Like it's a reality TV show. It's a wrestling match. It's bizarre. It's so unprofessional in every possible corner of the imagination. But people are, you know, I mean, are people eating like are people eating this up? Do people actually believe this [expletive] or is it like Well, I think that wrestling analogy connects back to what I was saying about the bad propaganda where it's like kayfabe, you know? It's like the things that they're saying people don't even believe, you know?
[26:25] It's like it's so obvious that this is contrived, but this the spectacle is the point here. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good point. Look, I mean, he's hemorrhaged support of young people. Like, it the young people's support is gone. I think it's we're just going to have another couple years of absolute chaos. It's going to probably get worse. There's no legislation that I mean, this has already been like a record low for legislation passed in Congress. At this point, we're going to have none if the Democrats take both chambers. Like, there's absolutely none. It's just more of this [expletive] circus 247 of weird executive orders just like ruling by fiat in and an you know extreme lame duck.
[27:12] The question is are other politicians going to just understand the first poll came out today showing him 29% approval. It's not the best pollster out there, but as his as he just continues to sink, are people gonna end up jumping ship? Probably. But I don't know. Is the rest of the administr that we have just sort of going to look like this Maha Summit? Just this last like grasping sort of fascist, you know, corporate capture, get what you can, you know, sort of survival of the fittest. Like that's sort of all this is with sort of the kind of facade of the government there, you know, just looting.
[28:00] It's just looting. That's exactly right. I think it's just going to be this type of looting for the next two years. And man, imagine being like a teenager, like a young person, just sort of becoming politically aware and thinking that this is, you know, normal. At least the war criminals in our age at least like had had a decorum, right? I don't know about that. I mean, they pretended to. What I could see, and I'm not calling this out, but you know, it's like it wouldn't surprise me at all to see, for example, Clvicular, who just got arrested for rape, be pardoned and used as like this like influencer, you know, alongside Jake and Logan Paul to promote peptides or something. Like that's how ridiculous this is becoming and it wouldn't be a shock to me whatsoever.
[28:47] Here's the thing is I saw that like meme or I don't even know that was just going on Twitter with him with clvicular and doing something with JD Vance at this point. I genuinely don't know if it's real cuz yeah you can't right I don't know. I would say there I think they're probably gonna you know this is some lowhanging fruit for them to get the you know the stench of Epstein off of them. So I think that's probably why they're going to throw you know throw out the tape brothers. Get rid of them. You know cut them loose. They're not really doing anything for them. It makes the public look like they're actually going after you know abusers and rapists. I don't know at this point. It's hard to even know how calculated they are anymore.
[29:33] Like I don't even know who they who is dispensable, you know? It's unpredictable. Yeah. Well, just I mean just as of my parting I guess thought about all this. I think that the potential silver lining here is that I think gradually increasingly so people are going to start waking up to asking the question if the psychedelic medicine field is actually the only or best way of doing things because this is classic you know recuperating this potential revolutionary force and making people think that they are involved in that when it's actually just feeding the machine and serving the fascist forces in society. So, you know, if more people can start to look at what's going on here and ask is another way forward with psychedelics possible, I think that we could start developing some momentum around discussing what that is.
[30:32] So, just as a slight silver lining in all of the rest of the hellcape. To undo your silver lining, what I think is super likely to happen here is that the biggest pharmaceutical companies or the psychedelic pharmaceutical companies, they're going to get approved. They'll probably, you know, Johnson will probably buy one of them. I think Compass is probably looking to get acquired at some point. A Tai's already been acquired by Lily. they'll get what they want and then the psych any momentum that'll be the zenith of like psychedelic momentum just like what happened with the cannabis industry and it's done. There's going to be no political inertia for any sort of decriminalization efforts or anything like that.
[31:19] They're going to get their moat. They're going to lock in their moat and we're going to move on because the government is in such a state of destruction at this point. Even if Democrats take over all three branches or all the executive and two chambers, they got a lot more important things to like worry about than some sort of psychedelic legislation at this point. So, I think we're I don't know. I don't really I've been so bearish on like this space for so long now that this all makes I'm so unsurprised that this is the way that that things have gone. I'm going to come between both of you and say here we go this we did this we've done this before [laughter] this the appropriate order.
[32:10] But I do agree with both of you like completely. I think that despite the fact that this may be the end and this may be the medicalization and it may be the you know hopeless for decriminalization in the near term at least we will have people realizing that psychedelic medicine is lumped in with the antiaxers and the maha people and it will create at least a grassroots understanding if not movement that something needs to be different And that, you know, psychedelics with all their potential are being co-opted and taken into this fascistic hell hole and joke of a system. And we can create change because people will realize that it needs to happen.
[32:58] And with that, there you go. And with thatium, I think we'll wrap it here. All right. Thanks for watching everybody. If you like this, give us a like and a subscribe or support us on Patreon. Me and Mike are going to be spending this week working on our new website. So, more on that soon, too. So, we'll catch all you guys later.
